


Anchor

by nirejseki



Category: Arrow (TV 2012), DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV), The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Historical, Alternate Universe - Medieval, Alternate Universe - Religious, F/F, F/M, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-04
Updated: 2016-06-04
Packaged: 2018-07-12 05:12:55
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,090
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7086760
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nirejseki/pseuds/nirejseki
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>At the turn of the thirteenth century, Lisette is forced to take orders as an anchorite nun despite the protests of her beloved brother Lenard.  Despite spending most of her life in a twelve foot cell, her life continues to be very interesting. </p>
<p> </p>
<p>For Lisa Snart Appreciation Week: Crossover/AUs</p>
            </blockquote>





	Anchor

**Author's Note:**

> An anchorite (fem: anchoress) is a type of Christian nun that was very popular in the medieval era. They would withdraw from society and seclude themselves for life in small cells (twelve-by-fifteen was a typical size) attached to churches, focusing their lives on prayer and religious thought. They would be fed and waste would be removed through small windows which would be facing inside the church, though they would sometimes also have windows facing the outside world for light.

Even when they had nothing, and as it neared the year of our lord twelve hundred it was very easy to have nothing, Lisette and Lenard had the stories they whispered to each other in the dark.

Society would have probably found it unseemly that Lisette crawled into her brother’s bed at night, frightened of her nightmares, even after she was old enough for proper skirts, but Lisette didn’t much care for society, which after all had done very little for her and her brother. Lenard would tell her every story he knew and some which he invented on the spot; he’d coax stories out of her, stuttering and slow at first but later smoother, more developed, more complex.

The last time Lisette saw her brother, she had just turned eight years old and he was sixteen, awkward and spotting and helpless to help her, beating the bars of his prison cell screaming her name as she was taken away, her father having sold her to the local nunnery, a strict order of anchorites, and as far as they were concerned she would never see the world again.

Lenard found her two weeks later, when his sentence had finally been commuted – Lisette didn’t really want to know how or why – coming to her lonely cell and kneeling beside it, whispering her name. She clung to the wall and wept, and her brave brother who let nothing touch his frozen heart wept in return. She begged him not to leave her and he slipped his hand through the small gap in the wall to the street to clasp hers and vowed he would never abandon her or their city, that he would go only ever to return to her. 

Lisette had a lot of time to contemplate everything in the anchorite cell – the squint that let her see into the church her only regular entertainment and not really all that entertaining at that – but Lenard faithfully visited her every day, even when the city was riled up and it was not wise for a boy known (if incorrectly) as the son of a Moorish woman to walk the streets. 

When she complained of boredom, Lenard told her stories when he could. When the riots began and his visits became shorter, he brought her books instead, stolen from monasteries and rich men’s houses: liturgical and theological texts, hagiographies, treatises, poems, transcriptions of troubadour songs, even political proclamations that were nailed to the central post in the city center when that was all he could find. As time went on, he brought her the Song of Roland, Ovid, Abelard, the Golden Legend, Dies Irae, ibn Gabriol, ib Zaydun and Wallanda, the Kuzari – with his aid she taught herself to read Latin, Hebrew, and the vernacular, and to write in it as well.

Lenard, thief to the center of his soul that he was, brought her more than just books and parchment and charcoal and ink; he brought her treasure like a magpie – first just little copper coins that she could run her fingers through, beads and crystals and little brass pendants, later little silver crosses and hairpins, and finally golden necklaces, rings and bracelets. At first Lisette thought he was bringing it to her to hide it, his little treasure trove where no one would dare disturb her solitude long enough to see her useless riches, but when she asked him why he never asked for anything back, he paused for a long time, his hand – the only part of him she had seen in nearly a decade – squeezing hers tight, and said, “Lise, they’re not for me. They’re for you.” 

“And who exactly am I supposed to dress up for in here, Lenny?” she said, laughing. “God?”

“For yourself, of course,” he replied, confused. “Who else matters?”

“Lenny, you’re a terrible Christian. Or a Jew. Or a Moor – I forget, which are you again?”

He laughed.

Some years later, ambiguous religious status or not, he started to talk about a man named Hunter who had come to their town, preaching Crusade. Lisette did not particularly want him to go, but the knights and bursars of the town were starting to notice Lenard’s light fingers and remarkable mind, and she did not particularly care for the thought of him suffering the final fate of all thieves. Better Crusade and its risks and possible gains, surely.

“Don’t you have a conflict of interest?” she asked, holding his hand against her cheek. “What with your family and all?”

“Nah,” he said. “They might talk big about Jerusalem, but everyone knows they won’t be able to wrestle that from Saladin and his people unless God sends his angels do the fighting for us; we’re going to get lost on the way and head to Constantinople instead.”

“Is it still a Crusade if it’s against Christians?”

“What do I know?” he said disinterestedly. “You’re the nun. You tell me.”

“You’re taking Mikael, right?” she asked. She’d never met the man her brother called his partner, had only heard his low voice calling Lenard back when it was no longer safe for him to linger by her cell.

“Yes, yes,” Lenard said. “Of course I’m taking Mik. Don’t worry. We’ll be fine. I’ll come back to you, I promise. You’ll be okay?”

“Lenny, _really_ , don’t be absurd. Of course I’ll be fine,” she lied through her teeth and hid her tears until he was gone. 

After that, she mostly had her books and her treasure and her loneliness (and Mass, of course, but that hardly counted, she could recite it forward and backwards and sideways too by now). When she heard a boy crying outside her cell wall, she reached out her hand to him. Little Bartolomeu clutched to her hand just as she had always clung to her brother’s and told her, his voice behind the wall, all about the angel of death in the lightning that had struck down his mother and how his father had never recovered from the shock, how the other men in town spoke behind his back that he was a liar who had killed her himself, how he questioned his own memory of the event.

Lisette assured him he wasn’t crazy, telling him – with some asperity – that if seeing visions of angels, even ones in lightning, were a sign of madness then there would be a lot fewer cells like hers. He laughed and he wept and she told him stories until he calmed further. 

Bartolomeu came to visit her often, not every day as Lenard had, but often enough. He brought his oldest friend, a girl named Iris who only grew bold enough to slip her dark-skinned hand in for a squeeze once Lisette had made a joke about Lenard’s frankly ridiculously convoluted ancestry, and later, his new friends Francisco and Katlina. 

Lisette wrote stories on the reams of parchment Lenard had given to her and gave them to the others freely. She told Francisco what words to use when he went to the Arab and Jewish quarters of the city in search of new inventions to learn, words that would make them relax and invite him in instead of shooing him away as a spy; she told Iris that Bartolomeu would eventually get over himself about her and that it wasn’t her duty to cater to his emotions; she passed along every bit of medical knowledge Lenard had inadvertently given her over the years to Katlina, copying the diagrams from her books as best as she could; and to Bartolomeu himself she gave stories and stories and stories – angels and demons and djinn, ancient gods of lightning and thunder, fairy stories from as far off as she could recall them, kelpies and dryads and undines, spirits of the air and will-o-wisps. 

One day, Iris crept to her window, voice thick with tears, and told her that Bartolomeu had been struck by lightning himself and now lay senseless in a bed, though the finest physician her father could find had taken him in for closer care and had even hired Francisco and Katlina to be his nurses and attend to him. Lisette wept with Iris, their hands clutched together through Lisette’s little window.

“When my brother returns,” Lisette said for the thousandth time, just as she had told Bartolomeu. “He will bring treasure beyond your imagination and we will not be afraid of anything, even death.”

“What if he never returns?” Iris asked, her mind caught on her closest friend, who she considered as a brother. “Not everyone comes back. Not everyone gets better.”

“He’ll be back,” Lisette said firmly. “He promised. You’ll see. They’ll both be back.”

“But what should I do until then?” Iris cried. 

“Let that Edouard of yours take you courting like he’s been wanting to,” Lisette instructed. “It’ll get your mind off of it. Have patience.”

“Oh, _patience_ ,” Iris said disdainfully. “That’s just what the priests say to make you feel better about the fact that you’re never going to be rich in this life.”

Lisette giggled. “Let me write you something,” she offered. “I’ll name it ‘Revelations on Patience’, and it’ll say just that, but all twisted and mystified that no one will ever be able to tell.”

Iris laughed. 

Nearly a year later, Bartolomeu woke up, head spinning but still himself. Lightning crackled in his fingers when he reached her hand in to her, but Lisette kept his secret safe – though when he proposed not telling Iris, who was now happily affianced to her Edouard, she grabbed his hand tight and lectured him until he begged for mercy and promised to tell Iris everything. 

A few months after that Lenard returned from Crusade. 

Lenard came to her, knelt before her wall and called her name in his familiar voice, and Lisette wept with joy. He had Mik as ever at his side and had returned from his journeys with a woman named Sarai Ta-er al-Safar – Lenard wasn’t entirely clear if she was his wife, or Mik’s, or perhaps no one’s at all; the answer seemed to change depending on who was asking or perhaps the time of day. 

They had gone to Constantinople and raided it for its riches; had gone beyond that, into the empire left behind by Saladin, to the inland seas, to the Baltics, to Persia, even perhaps to the lands of Prester John himself. Lenard returned with treasure upon treasure for Lisette – and a weapon for himself, a sword that burned white and froze all it touched, even as Mik told her with great excitement about his new crossbow, which shot Greek fire instead of arrows. Sarai herself was from Jerusalem, a girl who had run away from home and become a Nizari convert, a _hashashin_ who had served the Old Man of the Mountain, who had returned from death within his pits and had left his service while still alive, and yet she approached Lisette almost timidly at first.

“Your brother speaks much of you,” Sarai told her. “He has told your stories to all who will listen.”

“My brother is an excellent storyteller,” Lisette said with satisfaction. “Though not as good as me.”

“Can you really craft gold out of the air?” Sarai asked.

Lisette laughed and said nothing, for that was an old joke between her brother and her, that should anyone disturb her solitude and find her treasures, she would tell them she spun it out of the air – for how else would an anchoress who had not seen the light of day in nearly twenty years have so much gold?

Francisco, who according to his family studied far too much alchemy in the Arab and Jewish quarters of the city, promised recklessly that one day he would make her something that would craft gold from the air, but he was still working on it. She kissed his palm and wished him luck.

And still, as ever, Lisette wrote – poetry and theology and fairy tales and anything she could think of. Lenard or Bartolomeu would take her writings and give them to others to copy; indeed, her favorite of all of the riches of the East that Lenard had showered upon her was an illuminated manuscript of one of her more convoluted theological treatises, her absolute favorite one where she theorized on the nature of interpersonal bonds and the hidden clues in nature, the signs of love to the blind or of God to man, how a hand reaching out in the dark was the truest expression of faith she could conceive.

Lenard told her it was very popular among the soldiers he travelled with. He shared the news with the bemused tone of a man who observes the practice of a religion but does not share in it. Lisette laughed it off, not thinking much of it. “When you’re a nun you’re almost obligated to think about Christianity and God a little,” she said to him dismissively. “Besides, what’s the point of reading all those books about theology if I don’t write something with it?”

Sarai told her that she had written letters about her to her long-lost family. Lisette jokingly suggested that Sarai send them one of those copies of her treatise, but Sarai took her seriously and reported the next day that she had sent it. 

A few months later, Sarai told her, very solemnly, that it pleased her family immensely that she still read Christian theology even after her conversion. 

Lisette giggled. “You know I’m more than halfway to being a heretical nonbeliever, right?” she asked.

“Oh, yes,” Sarai replied, laughing. “That’s why I like your writing so much. You tell wonderful stories about faith; stories that speak of truth, regardless of whether you worship the Christian God or not. It is amazing to consider, when your brother, on the other hand, wouldn’t know what truth is if it jumped up and smacked him thrice in the face.”

“He’s terrible that way, isn’t he?” Lisette said.

“Let me tell you about my former brother-in-law Oliver,” Sarai said dryly. “He makes your brother look honest.”

“ _Former_ brother-in-law…?”

“Their marriage was annulled on consanguinity grounds; they’re still good friends. Honestly, I think Laurelle wants him to marry Felicity more than he does…”

“Tell me everything!”

Strangers started to visit Lisette as well after a while, complimenting her poetry and her theological treatises and her other works which, to be fair, Lisette had no idea how they even found out about them – apparently Lenard wasn’t lying when he said some of the other soldiers in the army liked what she’d written. Lisette thanked them and chatted with them briefly about theology, because why not? After so long alone, she was always happy to see company.

Lenard told her stories from the outside world that were simply unbelievable – stories of a man who ran faster than lightning (she thought of Bartolomeu and smiled) or a man who could control the weather (Markus was introduced to her after a considerable number of threats from both Lenard and Mik, but he turned out to be quite shy after he discovered that she had written his favorite treatise – he lost a brother, he told her, and it was the only thing that got him through that).

More people came to visit and talk. Lisette ended up having Francisco and Sarai work out a system for them to take turns – she did still need sleep, after all!

Sarai came to her one day and told her that her family was coming to visit, the whole set of them, even the now-infamous Oliver, who was apparently of the nobility, and his rival in love, Raimund, as apparently the much-desired Felicity was attending as well as Laurelle’s guest and neither of the men wanted to be left behind. 

“Really, now,” Lisette replied in amusement. “Traveling with a company that large? However are they justifying the cost?”

“They’re coming on pilgrimage, of course,” Sarai said. “It’s all religiously ordained and everything; the bishop gave them approval. Me being here is just coincidence, because obviously they couldn’t muster all that time and money and effort just to see an infidel. Particularly an infidel who managed to pick the single most belligerent variety of Islam available to convert to.”

“I’m sure,” Lisette replied, grinning. “Though honestly, what could they possibly say is here that would justify a _pilgrimage_? Our church doesn’t have any saints’ bones or pieces of the cross or anything like that; we’re not that large or that lucky a city.”

“Well,” Sarai said and her voice was deeply amused. “There’s a great mystic scholar, an anchoress, whose works are read throughout Christendom, around whom miracles are said to occur, and to whom many people comeon pilgrimage.”

“What, _here_?” Lisette said. “Really? When did that happen? What’s her name? I should send her a letter.”

Sarai is silent for a long moment.

“Lisette,” she said slowly. “Lenard said he had told you about the fame of your poetry? The treatise you wrote?”

“Well, yes, of course,” Lisette replied. “But he’s my brother and an inveterate liar; he always exaggerates.” She paused. “Right?”

“Not in this instance,” Sarai told her. “Lisette, where do you think all the people who come to see you _come from_?”

“I hadn’t thought about it,” Lisette said honestly. After so long in a twelve by fifteen foot room, she’d entirely forgotten about the concept of distance and travel except in theory. “Wait, what miracles?”

Sarai muttered an Arabic prayer for strength. “Tell me you know about that duel your brother and Bartolomeu had in the city center?”

“They’re both very silly, yes,” Lisette said. “I was assured no one was seriously injured.”

“Yes, but Bartolomeu used his speed and lightning and Lenard and Mik their ice and fire, so people naturally took notice of it,” Sarai said tartly. “And when asked where it all came from, they said it was a blessing from God.”

“Naturally,” Lisette said. “I told them to say that. Better God-given than someone getting the wrong idea about it being witchcraft, after all.”

“Well, now everyone thinks that your church is blessed.”

“Oh. Well. I suppose that’ll make them happy, won’t it?”

“Not if the numbers keep growing, they won’t. You do realize that most of the people who come to see you have been waiting for weeks?”

“They _have_?”

“You’d be overridden otherwise. Swarmed, more like.”

“Good God,” Lisette said, alarmed. “And what do they all want? Special powers? I can’t give them that.”

“No, most of them just want to be adjacent to holiness,” Sarai told her, starting to laugh. “All of these miracles, you’re sure to make sainthood, you know.”

“Shut your mouth this instant!”

“Saint Lisette,” Sarai said giddily, entirely consumed with laughter. “No doubt soon to be named the patron saint of liars and thieves and extraordinary abilities. Oh, and gold, of course.”

“You’re a terrible person,” Lisette accused. “Also, please tell me _you’re_ lying and I don’t have a budding army of devotees standing outside my cell.”

“Oh yeah, they’re totally an army,” Sarai said happily. 

When Lenard came for his usual morning visit the next day – no matter how many people were standing at her doorstep, Lisette wasn’t giving up her hour or two with her brother – Lisette berated him for not having mentioned the army.

“I _told_ you there were a lot of people!”

“A lot! A _lot_ , he says!”

“Well, it was _supposed_ to be a surprise,” he said sulkily.

“A surprise?” Lisette asked, surprised herself. “How would they be a surprise? Were you going to gather them all up and have them cheer for me or something?”

Lenard cleared his throat a little the way he did when he found something awkward, his fingers twitching in hers in a familiar sign of nervousness. “Actually,” he said hesitantly. “I was thinking you might want to…see them. Here. Outside, I mean.”

Lisette frowned. “How do you mean?” she asked. “I’ve taken my vows and been declared dead to the world; the door has been bricked shut, and even your ice and Mik’s fire can’t break through that without destroying half the church.”

“No,” Lenard said, a touch grumpily – it had been the first thing he’d thought of upon his return from the East. “But I’ve been working with Bartolomeu –”

“You? Working with Bartolomeu? Peacefully? Good God, we _have_ reached a time of miracles.”

“Shut up.”

“Do tell me if you see any flying sheep–”

“You’re a menace, has anyone ever mentioned?”

“You, oh, a million or so times.”

“ _Anyway_ ,” Lenard said, squeezing her hand affectionately. “We’ve discovered something interesting that happens when Bartolomeu moves fast enough. He can…well, essentially he vibrates so fast that his hand goes _through_ an object.”

“Through an object?” Lisette repeated, her hand tightening on Lenard’s until her knuckles were white. “Through a wall, for instance?”

“He’s been practicing moving things with him when he goes,” Lenard said, not complaining about his hand even as it turned red and white under her grasp. “It didn’t work that well at first – the carried item kept, um, getting caught and breaking into a thousand pieces – but he’s gotten much better at it. We did our first successful test of taking me through a wall yesterday–”

“Taking _you_!” Lisette exclaimed. “Wasn’t that dangerous? I don’t want you in a thousand pieces either!”

“I told you, he’s gotten much better,” Lenard reassured her. “We’re just going to practice a few more times today, but we thought…Friday?”

“Friday’s my birthday,” Lisette whispered. 

“Twenty-two years to the day from when they put you in,” Lenard said, voice equally quiet. “C’mon, Lise. Don’t you want to celebrate turning thirty in style?”

Lisette laughed till she cried.

She sent Lenard away, told Francisco she wouldn’t be seeing visitors the rest of the week, and turned her attention to selecting her best clothing and finest jewels. If she was going to go out, she was going to go out, as Lenard put it, in style. An anchoress, locked away from the world, spinning gold out of nothing at all – it would make a good story someday.

Friday arrived, and so did Bartolomeu, stepping through the wall in a burst of vibrations she could feel from where she stood in the center of her cell. He was a tall and lanky young man with a beaming smile and a frankly ridiculous red suit. 

She’d never actually _seen_ Bartolomeu before and she promptly drew him into her arms for a long hug. She’d almost forgotten how to hug people, it had been so long. Bartolomeu hugged her back enthusiastically. “You’re even prettier than I thought you’d be when I was a kid,” he told her with a grin. “And trust me, I thought you were very pretty. Ready for your grand exit?”

“Not even a little bit,” Lisette told him. “And at the same time, excruciatingly so. Let’s go before I lose my nerve or start crying or something.”

Barry took her by the hand and led her out through her wall – her much-hated long-term companion – into the bright plaza outside. At first Lisette was blinded by the sunlight, filling her eyes the way it hadn’t except for when she’d sit and squint outside on the brightest of summer days, but as her eyes began to adjust she saw a vast crowd, men and women of all religions mixed in there, watching a miracle. 

The first person she saw was a woman dressed all in white, two thin Saracen swords strapped to her side, which must have been Sarai. Beside her were a group of men – a shorter man with hair falling to his shoulders, a brunette woman with a kind smile, a redhead with a scruffy beard and a rakish smile, a hefty bald man who managed to loom over those around him, and a tall man, salt-and-pepper hair clipped close, whose hands were shaking and whose mercurial eyes she would never forget.

“Lenny?” Lisette said hesitantly. The man she was looking at said nothing but strode forward towards her; she bolted towards him, and he caught her in his arms, picked her up and spun her as if she were still the seven-year-old girl she was when they last embraced, twenty-two years ago. “ _Lenny_.”

“Lise,” he said quietly into her hair. “My Lise.”

And then all at once there was cheering everywhere, noise like a festival day. Her friends swarmed around her and there was nothing but joy.

**Author's Note:**

> My only regret in writing this fic is that by setting it in the 13th century I couldn't drop a reference to Julian of Norwich, a famous female religious writer and Christian mystic, who was totally my inspiration for writing this. But I wanted to make the Legends of Tomorrow joke about the Fourth Crusade getting "lost" more. 
> 
> A "hashashin" a European epithet for a particular medieval Islamic sect, which was infamously known for assassinating their enemies, and is where we derive our modern day word "assassin". One of their leaders was known as the "Old Man of the Mountain" and was said to have the fanatical devotion of his followers. You have exactly three guesses where DC Comics got its idea for the League of Assassins and Ra's al Ghul, and the first two don't count. I couldn't resist including the historical version here.
> 
> I've worked out far, far too much detail about the backstories of everyone else in this verse that was simply irrelevant from Lisa's POV. Feel free to ask questions. 
> 
> Also, apologies to anyone actually versed in medieval history. It is totally not my thing and I didn't have time to do research before/while writing this; it is entirely based on my vague memory of historical trivia I'd picked up over the years.


End file.
